For some readers, de Kretser's spare but flashy style may smack of overwriting. I enjoyed the writing in the book for the most part, although in the last fifty pages I began to find it wearying. At its best, though, her sentences take on the cadence of Jim Crace's best work.
. . . [W]hat Tom took from the scene was the thrust and weight of leaves, the season's green upswinging. Over time, his eye had grown accustomed to the bleached pigments of the continent where he had made his life. But love takes shape before we know it. On a damp, plumed coast in India, Tom's first encounter with landscape had been dense with leaves. A faultless place for him would always be a green one.
The book does demand concentration, however, and several times I found myself flipping back to reread previous pages, to make sure I'd caught everything before moving on. De Kretser jumps from one thread of the plot to another with dizzying speed. It is distressingly easy to get lost.
Where the book shines is in its characters. Tom and Iris, in particular, are as complex, as contradictory and consistent, as real people. Tom loves his mother but resents caring for her; even thinking about her produces a frisson of impatience. Nelly puzzles and intimidates him; his ex-wife fills him with unease. Above all, he is desperate to find his beloved pet. He fears appearing “unironic”; but in fact he is as sentimental as any man of the nineteenth century. He simply takes pains to hide it:
On seeing a beggar, Tom's first impulse was to reach for money. Then he would imagine being observed in the act of placing a coin in a hand; a sentimental act, an act of feeling. The shame this occasioned was so strong that it triumphed over charity. He would walk on, ignoring the beggar. Now he realized that what he risked in showing empathy was to appear unironic. Irony was the trope of mastery: of seeing through, of knowing better. And it was a reflect with Tom. He had invented himself through the study of modern literature, and it had provided him with a mode: the twentieth-century mode. To be modern was to be ironic. Among the things he was ashamed of was seeming out of date.
The person who makes him feel more ashamed than any other is Nelly. Nelly is an artist, but the descriptions of her art suggest more gimmickry and pretension than talent. Instead of selling her paintings, she photographs them and sells the photographs. Once the photographs are made, she claims, she destroys the paintings; there are rumors that she keeps them instead, planning to sell them for high sums in the future. In one instance she photographs a wet painting, then begins to smear its paint, photographing each change in the painting until its original contours are indistinguishable.
Tom's mother, Iris, is facing her old age and the various disappointments and indignities of her adult life. Iris was born the light-skinned privileged daughter of a wealthy (and haughty) Indian. Her sense of her own superiority, and her father's sense of his, are neatly summed up by de Kretser in the story of one unfortunate suitor:
Matthew Ho, the doctor's son who lived next door to the de Souzas, waited for Iris after mass. She had known him forever. On the way home, he asked her to marry him. Hygiene and his Sunday suit notwithstanding, he went down on one knee on the pavement. A crowd materialized at once to offer advice and encouragement.
Iris, schooled in obedience, relayed the news to her father. “Damn Ching-Chong cheek,” said Sebastian de Souza. He might have been enraged but chose to be amused instead. After a moment, Iris could see that amusement was what the situation called for. Father and daughter tittered together.
For weeks, a word was enough to set them off. Chopsticks. Pigtail.
But Iris does not, in the end, marry well. Arthur Loxley proves a poor provider. Upon her father's death, Iris loses her family home and the family emigrates to Australia, where Arthur promptly dies and Iris must endure menial jobs and the cruel and meager generosity of her sister-in-law Audrey. In her old age, her beauty disappears and her body fails; she is dependent upon Audrey and, more occasionally, Tom, for nearly everything. Through it all what endures is her love for her son, which begins at the moment of his birth: “They wrapped the infant in clean cloths and presented him to her. She hadn't known that the universe weighed five pounds, eleven ounces.” Tom also loves his mother, but his love for her is more complicated and conditional than her love for him; both her dependence and her devotion suffocate him. Their relationship is as realistically drawn as any fictional mother-child relationship I can remember.
The real subject here, what de Kretser really wants to write about, is the twentieth century, and its differences from the past. She makes numerous references to modernity and to the past that haunts modern times. Tom is a Henry James scholar; de Kretser notes more than once that Henry James was all about modernity. (Tom's James specialty immediately brings to mind Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty; but where that novel presented a Jamesian slant on modern life, de Kretser's style and perspective are her own, and very different from James's.) Tom specifically, explicitly wants a modern life—“a life that was free to be trivial, that had filtered out the dull sediment of tradition and inherited responsibilities, a life shiny as invention, that floated and gleamed—but his old-fashioned mother and his own temperament hold him back. One of the central questions of The Lost Dog is whether this modern perspective is really superior, really something to be desired.
The book has its flaws. It is a pity that de Kretser does not delineate her themes a little more clearly. The images begin to pile up—an old neon sign that no longer flashes, a bundle of 5 ¼” disks—and toward the end of the book I began to wonder if even she knew exactly what she wanted to say, or if she was just tossing in references to the passage of time as they occurred to her, in hopes that they would prove meaningful. For example:
One evening, as he was putting out his rubbish, he had noticed a woman wave at a car pulling away from the curb. Then she rotated her forefinger rapidly: she was asking the driver to call her. And Tom had realized that this gesture, once commonplace, had almost disappeared. He couldn't remember the last time he had seen it. The rotary-dial telephone, until recently an everyday object, was glimpsed now only as a ghost inhabiting a gesture; itself an ephemeral sign, transient as progress.
Is she perhaps making too much of a hand gesture?
The mystery of the fate of Nelly's husband seems to be intended to add suspense to the novel, but in many respects it is the least interesting and successful aspect of the book. The mystery it presents is obvious and its solution is anti-climactic. Each paragraph about Nelly's unfortunate husband made me more impatient with the whole subject, and more eager to return to the lives of Tom and Iris.
But today, a week after I turned the last page of this book, I am already anticipating my eventual reread. It is a clever book, peppered with pithy aphorisms. (“Charity, as those who have endured it know,” de Kretser notes, “is not easily distinguished from control.”) It is often witty. It is filled with memorable and poignant set-pieces, such as Iris's unexpected encounter with a former suitor. But most of all, The Lost Dog has a lot to say, and even though I read it slowly and carefully, I don't think I caught all of de Kretser's insights or probed all of her questions. This is a not just a well-written and entertaining book—although it is both of those things—it is a challenging book that made me think about the issues that it poses.
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